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The bitter cynicism of the masses these days - balik kampung makan kangkung.

It used to be bad enough. Ten percent commission for each wired tender paid out progressively. Now it is twenty percent commission paid out upfront.

The maincon runs dry even before starting so the subcons don't get paid on time; when they default the projects grind to a halt. An incomplete public sector project cannot be approved for public use.

Part of the commission is parked in offshore accounts in the dot. A smaller part is reserved as follows: when comes a general election, rm6,000 upfront for the longhouse headman; rm3,000 upfront for his sidekick; rm1,000 for each other family member, and they can number to forty or more. If BN wins, those amounts are given again.

So we have a national scam here - "Vote me in so that i can cream money out of rakyat funds that the poor don't think about because they don't contribute any so far, at least until GST kicks in next year.

Then park most of the corruptly taken money offshore and use a smaller part to corrupt the voting poor to vote me in again the next round.

It doesn't matter to me if the tender price finally balloons to one hundred sixty percent because everyone in the supply chain takes it they can make more from a guaranteed deal.

After all, it's just rakyat money."

All that is happening these days has been analyzed, predicted and articulated years back.

Now that oil prices are down, that forty percent government revenue from oil is gone because all those budgets were made assuming oil was usd105 per barrel; knock twenty percent off today's price and the budgets are already overblown.

And if you think 1MDB is a black hole, wait till the other two scams surface.

Meanwhile, to playing on race, we also play on religion. Some minister in Putrajaya said others should not be invited to mosques. Yet a short walk away from his office a guide waxes excessively to visiting non's dressed up to their eyeballs as darth vaders on the same genesis of the faith with the moses and abraham's of other faiths. All in the rakyat-funded steel and water-cooled mosques.

Do our PAS ultraconservative leaders ever wonder how hypocritical we have made out the Sunni philosophy of Al-Shafii who was once castigated for going against the mainstream even then?

Apart from twittering about swatting off the non's in Selangor, Hadi and company should be able to answer that question accurately. After all, they have all the time in the world from not attending coalition meetings these days.

And jokers are still now talking about protecting our Malay race.

If you want to understand the psyche of our Malays, just observe and conclude the psyche of the Indon workers at the most basal level in our midst. I don't blame the others for walking away.

1/2Walla, I wish to follow you through from para 4, ‘Part of the commission is parked in offshore accounts in the dot.’

First, you forgot to add as a post-script that the one who gets to pay not just one longhouse headman Rm6000, but to ten such headmen are usually the ones who also own a stable of top-end 4-wheel jets. ‘Ah, neh mind the rakyat will still do the ngajat to welcome me’ so says the regional numero uno

Now for the larger picture, or shall I say the larger universe, borrowing from Mathematics, the universal set. Implied in the term is that EVERYTHING, parts or wholes are all sub-sets of the universal set — the sub-sets by definition are not equal in quantity or quality. Not one member in the sub-set of even numbers can EVER transpose itself to be included in the sub-set off odd number, and only in the larger sub-set of natural numbers can we consider both even and odd numbers as equal members and are ‘at par’. But this analogy fails quite convincingly in social dynamics with particular regard to the movement of hard cash: what was once ‘at par’ now moves to the other sub-set to make the latter sub-set ‘above par’. Some sub-sets of wealth can diminish by overspending, lavish lifestyle, simple thievery, etc, and it is this — unlike numbers in the abstract — sub-sets of wealth as alluded to by Walla MOVE, HAS MOVED and will CONTINUE to MOVE offshore to the little dot, i.e. another sub-set to allow it to expand. If as some cosmologists have hinted that there are multi-‘layers’ of universes, the multiverse, can we assume that each sub-set is a sub-universe capable of expanding — for ever? If we accept this theory, we must also entertain the idea of a collapsing universe — the END OF TIME, and forthwith, the BEGINNING OF NEW TIME.

Question: Are we ready to accept that one universe will expand while another may be in the process of collapse — that’s the question I posed to a colleague Dr Tanaka years ago. The bloke has not responded — too engrossed, I presume, with Tibetan/Nepali hand-woven rugs whose unique feature is that it gives a golden hue when viewed at a certain angle and an ominous black sheen from another: gold – black; day – night, big dot – small dot, small – big dot. I am still surprised, despite the dichotomies at every level from within the Malaysian universe and the Nusantara universe, I still know the difference between a globular ondeh-ondeh and a split pancake, pardon me for this expression — rest assured the sun will still rise in the east tomorrow, the day after, and so on and so forth. The moral is: now BIG MONEY WILL CONTINUE TO FLOW OUTWARDS , ad infinitum, as it has always done so over the past 30 years until the other two scams collide in our midst to create two humongous cataclysmic black holes.

2/2The little dot has always been an enigma: one moment it wants to be known for its transparency, but the next, it doesn’t want the world to know that it was deflowered by big, albeit relatively clean money in the first instance, and now years down the road continues to play the evergreen virgin to attract more money, but this time from naughty uncles with naughty cash, made from naughty deals arranged by naughty warlords.

Having said that, let’s see what the numero uno from the dot has to say:“Money politics is at the heart of the problems in many countries in Asia. ‘Money politics’ is a codeword for buying of votes to gain power and after gaining power to RECOVER YOUR EXPENSES plus SOME PROFIT for the NEXT ROUND of VOTE BUYING.”

Walla, you have got good company from the little dot.

Time permitting I should like to touch on ‘ultraconservative leaders’, if only obliquely — for obvious reasons — but it will largely be how a scholar articulates his ‘moral’ position vis a vis modern intellectual and religious mores and make-beliefs.

I should have concentrated on the cosmos instead of on numbers and infinity, and suffer the indignity of dealing with big numbers but at the end of the day, not much in the pocket. That’s how bigmouths suffer, thank you and good night.

Let me get straight to the point about religious conservatives — they are no different from the conservative crowd anywhere in the world, and what defines them here applies to their kindred spirits elsewhere and even to those back in the distant past. Conservative forces are NEVER at peace with themselves the moment they sense the others are enjoying a peaceful moment. Collectively they DON’T want the world to be a happy place because that would mean fewer would look up to them for ...whatever… what verses to chant before entering a toilet…in what order should toenails be cut…ad nauseam. At another level conservatives with no claims to splendid celestial life in the hereafter discover that their finest moments are when they inflict physical pain on others.

So my first example , in reverse order, the quintessential conservative beast from within the conservative herd.

These are Anton Chekhov’s words:

“Our GRANDFATHER was beaten by HIS masters, and the LOWEST officials could SMASH his face in. Our FATHER was beaten by our GRANDFATHER, and we by our FATHER. What sort of NERVES, what sort of blood have we inherited?... (in a letter to Suverin): ‘What ARISTOCRATIC writers take from nature GRATIS, the less-privileged must PAY with their youth. Try and write a story about a young man – the son of a serf, a former shopboy, choirboy, schoolboy, and university student, raised on RESPECT FOR RANK, KISSING priests’ hands, WORSHIPPING the ideas of others, and giving thanks for EVERY piece of bread, receiving frequent WHIPPINGS, making the rounds as a tutor without galoshes, brawling, torturing animals, enjoying dinners at the houses of rich relatives, needlessly hypocritical before GOD and man merely to ACKNOWLEDGE his own INSIGNIFICANCE – write about how this very young man SQUEEZES the slave out of himself DROP BY DROP and how one fine morning he awakes to find that the blood coursing through his veins is no longer the blood of a SLAVE but that of a real HUMAN BEING’. (from Anton Chekhov by Henri Troyat)

This second part is taken from Hans Küng - 1998 — A Global Ethis for Global Politics and Economics:

“…this book… is all for MORALITY (in the positive sense). But at the same time it is against MORALISM (morality in the negative sense). For moralism and moralizing OVERVALUE morality and ask too much of it. Why? Moralists make morality the SOLE criterion for human action and IGNORE the relative independence of various spheres of life like economics, law and politics. As a result they tend to ABSOLUTIZE intrinsically justified norms and values (peace, justice, environment, life, love) and also EXPLOIT them for the particular interest of an institution (state, party, church, interest group). Moralism manifests itself in a ONE-SIDED and PENETRATING INSISTENCE on particular moral positions (for example, in questions of sexual behaviour) which make a rationale dialogue with those of OTHER convictions IMPOSSIBLE.”

Are we not aware of the moralists in our midst, absolutizing so many things and issues at convenient moments as if absolute answers are available only from them. Moralists and conservatives are indistinguishable by the words and language they use.

They are unhappy people MOST of the time, but the LGBT community makes them even more unhappy, and now they want to keep us unhappy ALL the time.